Sofia Miguens

Under the ideas of ‘hinges’ and ‘pictures’, as these relate to deep disagreement, Wittgenstein’s view of religious belief is a multifaceted challenge to conceptions of thought-world relations. In this article, I discuss Cora Diamond’s analysis of this challenge. Diamond herself is not particularly interested in hinges; I try to understand why. I first bring in a discussion between Michael Williams and Duncan Pritchard on how to read On Certainty. This allows me to identify Diamond’s perspective on deep disagreement and pictures: she concentrates on making sense, and not directly on knowledge. To further clarify her perspective, I introduce Hilary Putnam’s reading of the Lectures on Religious Belief, which proposes a cognitivist view of religion as ethics, centering on the notion of picture. Although Diamond is close to Putnam, for her, the most important challenge posed by religious belief lies not with epistemological issues of rational versus arational grounds of belief, or cognitivism versus non-cognitivism in ethics, but rather in making us drop the Fregean (and Tractarian) idea of the thinkableness of all thoughts, making place for ‘irreplaceable pictures’. I end by suggesting that Diamond’s analysis sheds light on often uncontested assumptions about the natures of thought and communication. Keywords: Wittgenstein on religious belief; Cora Diamond; Hilary Putnam; deep disagreement; hinges and pictures

Beneath Stanley Cavell’s philosophy for the future lies a view of history and historicity expressed by the ideas of ‘declining decline’ and ‘finding as founding’. In this article, I analyze how such ideas arise from readings of Emerson, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin. In his dialogues with these thinkers, Cavell engages with issues in the philosophy of history that are mostly absent from discussions of human life within the analytic tradition. I claim that Cavell’s notion of the ordinary is as much inherited from this engagement as from the philosophies of language of Austin and Wittgenstein. I end by suggesting that despite Cavell’s fascination with Heidegger, his philosophy for the future is in fact closer to Benjamin in the way they both conceive relations between art and the ordinary.

Although it was in his work that several important ideas regarding contextualism originated, J. L. Austin is a classic of the history of analytical philosophy often absent in recent discussions. My intention in this article is to identify some (bad) consequences of forgetting Austin when one is a self-professed contextualist. One further goal is to examine the conceptions of context being used within different varieties of contextualism. In A Plea for Excuses Austin claimed, “When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or “meanings”, whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use words to talk about”. In this article I will look at the way Michael Williams (Williams 2019) follows this lead in criticizing another epistemologist, Duncan Pritchard (Pritchard 2016).

Stanley Cavell’s approach to self-knowledge is unusual within analytic philosophy. Even so, the issue is central to his work. In this article, I begin by briefly characterizing the most common approach to self-knowledge in analytic philosophy and then identify Cavell’s reasons for taking distance from it, tracing them to his Wittgensteinian approach to action and language. Cavell is thus led to deal with self-knowledge centering not on privileged access or the incorrigibility of statements such as ‘I’m in pain’ but instead on the themes of skepticism, acknowledgment, and voice. I end by exemplifying the work done by such themes in his writings on Shakespearean tragedy.

There are similarities between Bernard Williams and Cora Diamond as moral philosophers: both their moral philosophies are marked by an engagement with the question of what it is like to be a human being, and both are engaged with experience more than theory. Still, such similarities rest on very different philosophical grounds. In this article, I consider whether a Nietzschean (Williams) and a Wittgensteinian (Diamond) could ever converge on a characterization of the ‘moral point of view’ as this involves views on life, thought, and language. I argue that divergences between Williams and Diamond persist, a very important one concerning relativism: whereas Diamond adumbrates a Wittgensteinian way out of relativism, it remains a last word for Williams.

The aim of the present article is to identify and analyze three particular disputes among current proponents of perceptual realism which may throw light on tensions present in the history of direct realism and current discussions. Starting from John Searle’s conception of direct realism, I first set McDowell and Travis’s approaches in contrast with it. I then further compare Travis’ view with McDowell’s. I claim that differences among the three philosophers are traceable first to methodological conceptions of the approach to perceptual experience (whether philosophical naturalism implies dealing with the sub-personal level), then to what makes for the particularity of a perceptual experience (whether it involves consciousness and a task of unity or not), and finally to what makes for the determinacy of an experience of things in the world (whether such determinacy characterizes the world itself or, as such, involves language and thought).

Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Minddelves into the relationship between the current analytical debates on consciousness and the debates that took place within continental philosophy in the twentieth century and in particular around the time of Sartre and within his seminal works. Examining the return of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy of mind and the idea that phenomenal consciousness could not be reduced to functional or cognitive properties, this volume includes twenty-two unique contributions from leading scholars in the field. Asking questions such as: Why we should think that self-consciousness is non-reflective? Is subjectivity first-personal? Does consciousness necessitate self-awareness? Do we need pre-reflective self-consciousness? Are ego-disorders in psychosis a dysfunction of pre-reflective self-awareness? How does the Cartesian duality between body and mind fit into Sartre's conceptions of consciousness?

Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind delves into the relations between the current debates on consciousness within analytical philosophy and the debates taking place in continental philosophy in the twentieth century and in particular within the work of Sartre. Examining the return of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy of mind and the idea that phenomenal consciousness could not be reduced to functional or cognitive properties this volume aims to rethink borders between what counts as ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ when the nature of the mental is at stake

All of Stanley Cavell's work, whether its topic is Shakespeare's or Beckett's theatre, Hollywood cinema, Caro's sculpture or Derrida's deconstruction, rests on the philosophies of language of Wittgenstein and Austin and on the vision that in these one finds the life of human animals in language and culture. Behind the question "What is art?" Thus, in Cavell, questions such as: How does one enter language? What is speaking on one's own behalf? How is it possible to escape from inexpressiveness? What does it mean to speak for others with whom we consent to associate? What is recognizing others, being recognized by them, or recognizing a community? What responsibility do I have for the way language means? What is consent and dissent? How do you come to have, not just your own voice, but a voice capable of articulating something new, for example, artistically new? How can that voice ever be shared?

The contours of contemporary philosophy are difficult to trace. How can we orient ourselves among authors such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Foucault, Derrida, Adorno, Benjamin, Deleuze, Agamben, Zizek, Badiou , Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Austin, Putnam, Davidson, Rorty, Kripke, McDowell or Cavell? How can we orient ourselves among terms such as phenomenology, analytical philosophy, existentialism, pragmatism, feminism, postmodernism, Nietzscheanism, naturalism, materialism or cognitivism? Presenting a journey through figures and movements of contemporary philosophy, this book suggests an answer, supporting the reader's personal exploration.

In this article the authors identify and analyse points of agreement and disagreement between Michael Ayers and Charles Travis, starting from their views on ‘things before us’. The authors then try to spell out what separates these philosophers in matters concerning perception, knowledge and language. In spite of their both being self-professed realists, equally critical of conceptualism and representationalism, Ayers’ empiricism and Travis’ anti-empiricism lead them to different positions in these three areas. It is shown that in the case of Ayers they hinge on “ordinary” objects and a KK principle (knowledge that and how we know), whereas in the case of Travis they are articulated around occasion-sensitivity and anti-psychologism.

In this article I focus on Cavell’s theme of finding one’s voice, as it is articulated with reference to the philosophies of language of Wittgenstein and Austin. I start by spelling out Cavell’s Wittgensteinian-Austinian view of culture as the background for his approach to aesthetics and ethics. I then set out to explore the work done by the theme in aesthetics and ethics around the notion claim. I argue that Cavell’s effort to counter the pull of non-cognitivism in aesthetics and ethics, building on the notion claim, is not only illuminating of his unique way of inheriting the history of analytic philosophy but also gives us a glimpse of where and how Continental and analytic philosophy may again cross paths in the future.

In this article I discuss Daniel Dennett’s view of the role of natural language in the evolution of the human mind. In contrast with defenders of the Language of Thought Hypothesis, Dennett claims that natural language is an evolved tool for communication, originating in behavioural habits of which users were initially not aware. Once in place, such habits changed access to information in human brains and were crucial for the evolution of human consciousness. I assess Dennett’s approach from the viewpoint of philosophy of mind and language and consider its ontological implications. I contrast Dennett’s views with the universalist and internalist claims of Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky and show how, by appealing to memes and cultural evolution, Dennett resists such claims. I then analyse how this picture goes together with a deflationary view of consciousness. I end by pointing out that although Dennett’s global picture seems to point towards a pluralistic ontology, he himself refrains from taking such a step.